England has a reputation for being a damp country, but these last few months have been especially trying for people in the UK. January was England’s wettest winter month in almost 250 years. Approximately 146 mm of rain fell in January, a new record, according to the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford. Much of Southern England and Wales was deluged as well, and there was major flooding as a result.

The question everyone is asking, of course, is whether this is a chance occurrence or related to climate change. It’s not as easy to answer as one might think. While it’s true that warmer air can hold more water, and thus make a rainfall more intense, as I noted, wet weather and flooding have always been a feature of weather in that part of the world. So the question should really be: has the risk of more extreme wet weather increased?

To get those answers, ClimatePrediction.net wants to run the numbers on two very big groups of simulations. One will look at the conditions from the winter we just experienced, and another will be looking at what it might have been like if we hadn’t been emitting greenhouse gasses all this time.

You can help with this project, and the good news is that you don’t have to grab a stack of paper and pencils and work out the math yourself. Simply download a bit of software called BOINC from this link, install and launch it, and select ClimatePrediction.Net as your project. Then create an account by following the prompts from BOINC. The results will be posted here, and if you want to know more about how to interpret what you see on that page, check out the expected results explanation.

BOINC, which is short for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is a piece of software that you can download to your computer. With it, you’re able to donate spare computing time to big data projects, essentially allowing your computer to do your citizen science for you.

Until recently, the software was only available for desktop devices, but the project has now been ported to Android. That means that when you’re not playing Angry Birds, you can donate your smart phone’s processing power to science.

Malaria is one of the deadliest infectious diseases on the planet. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2010, malaria caused an estimated 660 000 deaths, mostly among African children. That roughly translates into one child death every minute, or the same amount of time it will take you to read this post. Sadly, this does not need to happen: malaria is both preventable and curable.

Participating couldn’t be easier: all you need to do is sign up, download the software, and select the projects you want to run. Then you let your computer do all the hard work.

The computer software will evaluate millions of candidate compounds against some 15 different molecular drug targets to discover new inhibitors that can block the activity of multi-drug-resistant mutant superbugs.

If you’ve seen the movie An Inconvenient Truth, or watched Ted talks by James Hansen, Rachel Pike, or James Balog, you’ll know that discussions about climate change involve a lot of data, and that our understanding of the Earth’s climate is constantly evolving. That’s because there are hundreds of parameters to consider when doing any kind of climate modelling, and tens of thousands of data points to crunch through.

You can help refine our predictions, even if you’re not a trained climatologist; indeed, you don’t even need to be any good at gauging the chance of rain. You can simply download the BOINC client on to your computer, and configure it to process data from ClimatePrediction.net.